Walter Powell

Bio:  Walter (Woody) Powell is Jacks Family Professor of Education (and) Professor of Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication at Stanford University. He is also an External Faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, The British Academy, and a fellow of the Academy of Management, and has honorary degrees from Uppsala University, Copenhagen Business School, and the Helsinki School of Economics. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council since 2000, and has served as interim co-president, chair of the board and the Executive Committee. He recently served as the Sarah Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His recent books include The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, with John F. Padgett (Princeton University Press) and The Nonprofit Sector, co-edited with Patricia Bromley (Stanford University Press). His research interests focus on the processes through which ideas and practices are transferred across organizations, and the role of networks in facilitating or hindering innovation.

Research Interests:  I study the emergence and persistence of social institutions. I am particularly interested in the dynamics of social networks and the evolution of rules inside organizations. My work is both historical, using 'ethnographies' of archives and records and quantitative, using larger data sets on relations within and between organizations. Lately, I have become interested in the survival strategies of civil society organizations in autocratic regimes around the globe, and how participation within these organizations is structured.